I have deleted more songs than I have released. Hundreds of them. That is the part nobody puts in the headline.
The question I get is whether the music is mine. It is a fair question. So here is the actual process, and you can decide with real information instead of a feeling.
The concept comes first. Nine cards, nine archetypes, a spine before a single sound exists. Then the lyrics, line by line, in my own words. Na Mi Sef I Get is written in Krio. That is my mother tongue on the record, not a style setting I picked off a menu. Then the sound. Genre, tempo, texture, the specific way I want a voice to crack on a held note. All of that goes in, and something comes back.
Almost always what comes back is wrong.
So I go again. Change one word. Rewrite the bridge. Cut a whole verse because it was rhyming instead of saying anything. Twenty takes. Forty. Sixty for one song that runs three minutes. I listen to every single one and I know inside four seconds whether it is dead.
The part that takes the time
That is the work you cannot see. The taste. The thousand small refusals that make one yes possible.
People hear the word AI and picture a button. Press, receive song. If that worked, everybody with a laptop would have a record worth hearing, and they do not.
I treat the model the way a producer treats a session player. The player is astonishing and has no idea what the record is about. You have to know what you want, say it precisely, throw out what misses, and keep the take that carries the thing you were reaching for. The intention is the authorship. It always was. No guitar has ever written a song either.
Here is what I have not resolved. I do not know exactly where my instinct stops and the machine’s pattern starts. Some melodies come back sounding like nothing I would have written on my own, and I keep them, and I love them, and I cannot fully account for where they came from. I am not going to pretend that is tidy. I sit with it. It is one of the honest costs of building this way.
What I am sure of is smaller and harder. The concept is mine. The words are mine. The rejections are mine, and the rejections are most of the record.
Every instrument in history arrived and somebody said it was cheating. The drum machine. The sampler. The synthesizer. Each time, the people who made real work with it were the ones who already knew what they were trying to say.
If you build with these tools and someone asks whether it counts, ask them what making has ever been. Then go finish the thing.